Tricky, all this-like inviting the murderer to perform the autopsy. I had a few things in mind, a certain image for the page, and I was working toward this. Jason Schwartz No plan to challenge the norm. Was this a gradual approach you came to over time or did you set out to challenge the fictional norm? What about your method changes between A German Picturesque and John the Posthumous? Your work has been singled out for its departure from conventional or straightforward narrative-but maybe it's simpler just to say that, while most books presume eyesight as the prime sense organ, your work strikes me as specifically tactile. McCormack I want to begin by talking a little bit about the evolution of your style. Here, he confirms that his work is no mere whimsical dalliance with language and, finally, tells me what a “hornbook” even is. I emailed back and forth with Jason Schwartz to get some answers. Etymologies are unpacked, ancient architectures felt out from the inside and sentences cunningly assembled out of oddly tactile consonants to create an utterly unique reading experience that scratches some deep cranial ditch of the unconscious like no work of prose before it.Īs you can see from the above, all who read Jason Schwartz succumb to the disease of trying to place a prose style that outpaces all descriptive language not already absorbed into the dead serious and sinister trivia he reserves for old beds (“ Bed, in any case, once meant flay, as in a burr mattock or a beggar’s cup”), surgical instruments (“The bone saw would say the boy’s name”), and English canon law, which “allows for mention of a hedgerow, or, in lieu of this, a narrative about a black house.” John the Posthumous is a book that asks its share of questions (“If death is a room, as one conception has it, then where is the family?”) and provokes many more. Whereas another book would begin by identifying the child, man, and woman, in John the Posthumous detail and implication take precedence, leaving only lurking impressions of why it might be pertinent to note that “Various medieval diseases were named for the Devil-but then, so were doorframes of an especially peculiar design” or that the titular monarch reigned in France for five days. Your dictionary calls them stories, but these we can see behind the child. But parables are not always the same as lies. Riddle me this, for example: In Matthew, the house is a dead bird or a box of thorns. Or perhaps these remains are the stories themselves. Broken into three sections-“Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure,” and “Adulterium”- John the Posthumous reads like a story that already befell its characters, disastrously, and what is left is to pore over the rooms, interrogating the objects and words as though they themselves were the guilty parties. Schwartz’s second book, John the Posthumous, new from OR Books, confirms Schwartz as a writer with neither peer nor precedent, except perhaps in certain Puritan textbooks, diagnoses of medieval plagues, and Biblical glossolalia. a master.” I was curious, if not outright incredulous: how was it possible for a single writer, a twentieth-century American “master” no less, to depart wholesale from the line of succession and influence that I understood literature-with its various avant-gardes, occasional norms, and buffet plate of styles-to comprise? “The nouns will be the bones, the adjectives the cartilage or skin and the verbs will be the organs,” wrote The Los Angeles Times in a typically gnomic review, while Ben Marcus, not obviously insane, described Schwartz as being “unlike any writer on the planet. More than anything, it was that it seemed possessed of the power to make anyone who tried to describe its contents sound completely insane. It wasn’t just because I knew Schwartz as a favorite of legendary editor and teacher Gordon Lish, who published Schwartz’s first stories in his magazine The Quarterly, or because the title struck me as provocatively incongruous given that there wasn’t anything obviously Teutonic about Schwartz, whose author note described him as living in Pennsylvania (he has since decamped to Florida). Years before I read it, Jason Schwartz’s 1998 collection A German Picturesque (Knopf) captured my imagination.
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